Lonely Hunters
by saphira and shruikan
Summary: [AU where the Indoraptor survives the end of the movie, learns how to be a functional wild animal, and has raptor babies with Blue. Kinda-sorta written in the style of White Fang, and purely PURELY self-indulgent.]
1. Ignoramus

The Indoraptor fell. He twisted in the air, legs and tail flailing for balance. The other raptor ripped from his grip, clinging to a ceiling girder with her legs and watching him plummet. He flipped on his side and watched helplessly as death rose beneath him, a pair of titanic bone spears, waiting for gravity to gift them his flesh.

But he flipped again, and the spears did not find him. He slammed into the skull between them, skin flayed but not pierced by the tusks on either side; he bounced off and skidded across the cold marble floor.

Stunned, he lay there panting. The world rocked to and fro beneath him.

After a seeming eon, he lifted his head and peered about. The creatures were gone from the roof; he was alone. He staggered to all four feet and sniffed the air, sniffed his sliced sides. The ground swayed below, and he staggered. There was blood coming from his bashed head.

The Indoraptor heard faint noises, but could not guess their source, nor identify the faint bellowing separated by countless walls. He paced out of the wreckage from the broken skylight, balance returning with each loping step, and followed his nose until he found the outside.

He'd glimpsed it during his rooftop foray, but in the rain had mistaken the swaying treetops for the silhouettes of buildings. Now confronted with their height he hissed, crouched, threatened by their mobility in the whipping wind. Crashing within the depths drew him further among their red trunks. The alien dimensions of knotted bark and irregular patterning of the roots crisscrossing the forest floor displeased him; he longed for straight edges and walls, a roof above limiting surprises. The rain pouring from the heavens was a constant irritation; used to the dark and the damp was he, but a flood was new, and offended his overstimulated senses.

A beast came crashing through the underbrush, its beaked face suddenly illuminated by lightning beside him. Instinct compelled him to leap clear of the adversary, his body twisting away as his head lashed out at the end of his long neck. His jaws closed on its flabby throat and it keened, stomping forth, dragging him with it. He wrenched and twisted to kill it, blood flowing into his jaws, but the beast refused to slow, and its neck refused to break. He clung to its bulky side in frustration, and it, roaring in pain, galloped sidelong into a tree, crushing him painfully between its charge and the hard trunk.

The Indoraptor fell twisting from its side and sprang to his feet, bloodlust and rage carrying him after it, but the world spun again and the ground rose swiftly to meet him. He panted, slumped upon the muddy forest floor; his head had not stopped bleeding. He let the lumbering animal escape.

The earth began to rumble; the Indoraptor possessed no instinct to predict what it might mean, and so did not escape what the lone beast had foreshadowed. No sooner had he begun to puzzle and fear the change than did the source explode from the dark rain, a massive herd of screeching animals. The Indoraptor squalled in panic. They, many, horned, long-necked, trampled around and over him, stomping, most coughing in great heaves of their chests, and all smelled foul, all of sickness and death. The Indoraptor clung to the side of a tree and snapped and bit at any who grew near, but the herd in its panic ignored him, endured his bites to focus on fleeing the death-gas that had almost claimed them. A lone predator was, by comparison, a walk in the park.

Only after they had all gone did the Indoraptor finally let his snout fall into the mud, panting and aching. Their footprints had scored his sides with scrapes and bruises; the humans had never caused such bustling pain. His bloodlust cooled, the Indoraptor instead missed his cell. He missed the dim, freezing den at the end of the man-hallway. He missed straight lines and the total, oppressive silence in the nighttime when he was the only creature in the world. Claustrophobia was a comfort; this odd new world held too many variables, too much confusion for his sheltered mind.

The sky rumbled, and blue light danced between some dark clouds. Their textures looked difficult to grip, and the more the Indoraptor looked up at the zenith of the world, the less he could stand it. How many worlds were there? Could a creature somehow get to those heavens and race among those cloudy cliffs? He had only just discovered the world beyond the walls, and grasping its scope was too much to bear. Blue light flashed between the clouds once again, and the Indoraptor twitched, badly. His head began to twitch with rhythmic shrugs. He struggled to his feet and limped through the forest, tripping on fallen logs and ditches, whines sliding between his teeth with each stride.

Occasionally, the humans would crowd the bars with sticks that grasped dancing blue light at the end, and when they probed deep into the cell with these sticks, into the corners where the Indoraptor would tuck himself, and jabbed his hide with the ends, light and pain would explode through his body. They would do it until he thrashed and seized, foam flying from his mouth, limbs flailing and aching, his tail jackhammering against the floor. It felt like all his insides were then out. The Indoraptor was not going to wait until whatever humans up there came down to poke him with more electric sticks.

He found, eventually, the lights of the great human structure, and skulked about its shadow in uncertainty, struggling to gauge which entrance to take advantage of. Humans milled about, and though his bloodlust was aroused, he couldn't muster the energy to go after them. A scent beside the stairs gave him pause, and stinging memories of the other raptor came to mind, of her clinging to his back and escaping his teeth. He smiled reflexively, mouth aching from the unnatural movement.

Eventually he broke the glass of a disconnected shed window, and forced his way in with difficulty. He could hear human cries beyond the walls but paradoxically found comfort in them. Humans he could understand. They wanted to hurt. They made noise and stared and stung, and that he had survived, many times over. He crammed himself between the wall and some metal vehicle and slept almost immediately.

—

He woke when searing light shined directly into his eyes, and the vehicle beside him erupted into a rumble. He launched himself away from it, crashing out into the world with a scream. For the first time, the Indoraptor saw daylight. It was devastating; he could not comprehend it fully at first. The color and depth given to the world was too much to bear. He couldn't handle the amount of open space before him.

The humans surrounding the vehicle began to cry out; without much thought or effort, the Indoraptor snapped his jaws shut around the shoulder of the nearest one and flung it. By then the others had their stinging guns trained upon him, and he knew death would leap out at any moment. He turned and galloped for the closest shadow, the trees. The ground exploded beneath his feet; one shot whizzed by and sliced through the meat of his tail. The Indoraptor dove into the bushes and loped on, fleeing until the yelling had disappeared.

He collapsed on his side in the near-dark beneath a tilted tree and panted, croaking in pain from the previous day's aches and the hole in the base of his tail. He turned and licked it, probed it with his tongue, trying to convince the pain to dispel, but it refused. He peered out into the daylight. It chased him even here, peeking down upon him from the canopy. He hissed and growled at its offending rays, and stuck to slinking through the bushes.

For a while he wandered, struggling to make sense of every dip and hump in the land. He gnawed restlessly on bark, puzzled by its yielding softness; he sampled leaves, needles, mushrooms, and rocks he chanced upon. He stomped through a bubbling creek and bit at the bubbles accumulating between shards of shale. He attempted, many times, to clamber up the boughs of big trees, only to fall harshly back on his rump.

Only by accident did he discover the hunting he'd been denied. By following the creek upstream he came upon a wide lake, and atop it a rumbling waterfall. In the dancing waters above the waterfall he spotted a great black creature, squatting on powerful legs with its mouth open. It snapped as salmon flew flailing past, and swallowed down wriggling fish within its reach.

In great excitement, the Indoraptor rushed up the falls and leapt upon the bear, teeth and claws digging into its soft belly. It roared and responded in kind at its bizarre assailant, but gurgled and died as his hind legs disemboweled it with messy kicks. Its innards stained the water pink as he ate his fill, and for the first time he could without reproach. Hunger had been his constant companion all his short life, stunting and disfiguring his already unnatural form. He ate until chunks of flesh stayed lodged in his gullet, unable to go further down; his sides clenched and he vomited almost half of what he'd eaten, unknowing of his own limits. And still he ate more, vomited it again, and ate again.

He sprawled on a flat rock, scales still oozing blood from his new wounds, belly bulging, staring at the rushing water and the fish occasionally flying out of it. A memory he previously discarded came back to him, of the bear waiting for the prey to come flying within reach, and the Indoraptor briefly wondered if he could replicate the trick. He rolled onto his belly and stuck his neck out over the water, mouth open much wider than the bear's had been. For a while the fish avoided the shadow he cast over the water and leapt around the rock's other side, and he eventually gave up.

He didn't know it, but it was one of his swiftest forays into empathetic thinking. To replicate the behavior of an entirely different creature on the first encounter would set any animal behaviorist to great excitement. But it was all the Indoraptor knew. He had subsisted primarily on the faces of humans, on their probing eyes and hands, for lack of a better alternative. Social thinking was in his DNA, even more so than it was in his genetic mother, the Indominus Rex, who was mainly solitary predator with a side of pack animal. The Indoraptor was flipped, a group thinker with a sprinkling of lone wolf to make his head bulky and his mind curious and lonesome. But the circumstances of his birth and upbringing had choked off any potential for this to become second nature. He had been denied the company of his own kind. He was an in-between, a stepping stone, a ligament and not a major tissue. Prototypes did not deserve the luxury of a social life.

But his body and mind unconsciously cried out for it, though he had no way of knowing it. And so he had subsisted on mimicking humans, on flexing his arms when they flexed theirs, bowing and tilting his malformed head when they spoke and gestured to each other. Eye contact was the closest they ever came to his enclosure, and only once had someone ever made the mistake of getting closer. With a bash of his tail, the Indoraptor had burst the lightbulb keeping his cage illuminated, and feigned sedation when darted. The Indoraptor later used the maintenance worker's skull as a toy for many months.

His dislike of the brightness and heat finally roused the Indoraptor into hopping off the rock and seeking shade. Only by entering the trees again did he chance upon the scent of one that gave him pause; a growl issued from between his lopsided teeth. The scent was fresh, enough to make his memories bite. He followed where it was strongest, slinking through the shadows; the dappled sunlight played with the yellow and gray of his hide, camouflaging his approach.

He spotted the other raptor high up on a rocky ridge, her tail flicking through the air as she surveyed the horizon. He didn't know it, but her name was Blue. Instantly he rushed up with a hoarse screech, arms stretched forward and claws out. Blue leapt out of his reach with a snarl, landing a ways away with her body low to the ground, tense and ready to jump. They growled at each other, whines building in their throats; the Indoraptor knew then, with sudden resolution, that he wouldn't rest until she stopped struggling between his jaws. The wounds on his back from her sickle-shaped claws still stung.

The Indoraptor leapt for her and she dashed out of his reach again, into the underbrush. He galloped after her, bellowing his hate for the entire forest to hear. Still Blue sprinted always out of his reach, leading him in an exhausting chase up and down the mountainside. Her previous encounters with varied terrain gave her the agility to leap easily from rock to rock, while the Indoraptor slid and clambered clumsily across them on all fours, not yet confident enough to navigate them. But he persisted; the rush of bloodlust was upon him, the thrill of chasing another creature.

The Indoraptor lost Blue swiftly, but he pursued her scent anyway, drool dripping from between his lipless teeth, his sickle-shaped talons tapping the earth energetically with every step. When exhaustion slowed him, he plowed on in a trot, then a four-legged crawl. By the time the California heat wore him down and his endurance gave out, aided in no small part by the huge meal he had just devoured (he vomited twice on Blue's trail, and didn't stop moving throughout) he was in territory he recognized even less than previous, and perishingly overheated. He collapsed in shade, his black flanks rapidly rising and falling. His red eyes swept across unfamiliar plains dotted by copses of leafy trees. Mountains rose and fell like the curves of a massive live thing.

Swooning from exertion, the Indoraptor dozed for hours on end, mouth ajar and panting. Flies gathered on his bloody mouth as he slept. It was twilight when he woke, and the air not much cooler, but he forced himself to rise no matter how his muscles protested. Blue's trail was still present, and he plodded on all fours along it, his third eyelid nictitating across his slit pupils to clear out the dust rising from the grass. He pursued with the same singleminded obsession that had driven him across raining rooftops and into Maisie Williams' bedroom two nights previous; another had been sighted by him, sighted him in turn, and survived. He couldn't handle thinking of how their eyes had met and nothing else had happened. The overstimulation of it was unbearable. He couldn't stand the stares of humans beyond his cage's bars, and how he could never get to them to punish them, to culminate the connection that had been established by dismembering and devouring the offender. He had to finish what was started.

His chase was not that of predator and prey; in a way, the Indoraptor didn't know what the two forces were. There was Him, and all Else; the Raptor and all Others, who brought nothing but stings to his body and scratching noises to his mind. To be near the Indoraptor was to be silenced; he craved and reviled solitude, and had no idea how to live differently. The sheer presence of another overwhelmed him. He had to end it, to save himself. As long as Blue lived, he would feel threatened, unfulfilled.

Again he chanced upon Blue, who had thought she'd lost him long ago. She sprang away with little difficulty from the stream where she drank and he had burst in, and again loped off into the night. So began again the following of the trail.

The Indoraptor stopped only for want of food and rest, and all other times hunted down the path. He kept surprising Blue, only for her to turn tail and run. He had no instinct to conserve his energy and bail on a death struggle that would cost him too much to win, but Blue was older and wiser, and had battled many larger beasts. The Indoraptor's stalking didn't matter as long as she was faster and surer of footing, for her enclosure was now the entire neo-Jurassic world. She would merely avoid him until he lost interest or died.

But she underestimated the obsession of her stalker. The Indoraptor took to observing her instead of springing upon her without warning. He watched her explore from the depths of dark bushes, always downwind to avoid his scent blowing into her nostrils; he was forced to learn to take the wind into account when she kept sensing him and bolting. He watched across sunlit fields as she stalked bounding deer and brought them down, areas he refused to tread because it felt too open, and he resented the sunlight on his scales; he observed her grooming and picking at her pebbly skin, a feat that escaped him and his scraggly teeth; and he waited impatiently for her to make the mistake of dozing, and there he would burst upon her, barely missing her each time she roused and fled.

The Indoraptor hunted too on his own, harvesting the tactics he'd witnessed in Blue. He learned to overturn rocks until snakes and mice wriggled out, to wait until just the right moment for ungulates to come within reach of his deadly leap. He wasn't as successful as she was; he could not run as fast as her, and his overlarge feet and hands continued to trip him up during times he needed to be stealthy. But he sustained himself enough to continue the chase.

He hated it all the while. The forest was too big, too full of endless variables. Water ran through veins in the land, trees and rocks gouged the topography, and rain and thunder fell as often as clear sunshine did. Bugs buzzed in the evening, more replacing each nagging fly the Indoraptor happened to catch. He had to find his own food, and plenty of it. The constant chase brought his meager endurance to its limit. More and more he missed his cell and the silence it brought. When the hunt was over, he decided, he would go back.

Blue became an anxious thing, nervous at every snapping twig, expecting the black beast to come barreling out of the forest. At times she knew he was there; she would swivel her head around and pinpoint him lurking in the brush, from a distance too great for him to cross in just one leap. Then she would stare. Most often, this stare infuriated him, roused him and sent him chasing after her, only to lose her again. But sometimes he let the stare fester. Blue peered at him with one bright eye and he glared back, orange to red, and the Indoraptor felt his hate grow and grow until it filled him with no room for anything else.

A peculiar mood overtook Blue nearly every night, behavior the Indoraptor found odd and reasonless. Blue would climb to the highest point available, neck arched high up to the sky, and utter a raspy cough, over and over, letting the sound roll across the surrounding landscape. She paused after each round of coughing, head tilted and listening, before resuming the call again. She would persist for almost an hour, then reluctantly wander off, her efforts seemingly unsuccessful.

The Indoraptor didn't know what she searched for, nor did he really care. He had no way of knowing that Blue's solitary situation was a status forced upon her. Many times did she look beside her for her sisters when on runs, and each time disappointment and longing filled her up when she found nothing. The Indoraptor had little use for this knowledge.

But he did have use for that call.

On his own, he slunk away and practiced imitating it. He coughed gently, far away from Blue's ears, until he had perfected the short, husky bark. That very night, he deployed his trick. As Blue perched upon a rocky outcrop and began to call, the Indoraptor tucked himself into a secure hiding place and answered.

Blue fell deathly silent, head cocked. The Indoraptor barked again and she sprang to life, leaping from her vantage point and racing to the source of the noise, a reedy call bubbling in her throat.

He could barely wait until she was within reach to burst out of the bushes, jaws closing around her neck and hands gripping around her chest. She squalled, outraged at his trickery, and struggled desperately to escape. The Indoraptor bore down upon her, crushing her with his doubled size and ripping her apart with teeth and claws. Hot blood filled his mouth. Blue's talons kicked out and gouged great troughs of flesh from the Indoraptor's belly and legs, but he paid no attention to it, too hyped up in his bloodlust to care.

Eventually Blue fell limp, not from injury but from exhaustion from struggling. She dangled from his teeth and panted, eyes rolling, head at an ugly angle. The Indoraptor stilled too, now registering the pain from their exchange of blows. The blood and heat tasted good; he could feel her pulse against his tongue, not yet burst beyond repair. Yet he didn't dig for it. He wouldn't release her, but he injured her no further as he contemplated why he didn't feel justified in killing her yet.

He was tired of the forest and its change. Nothing ever stayed the same, and the Indoraptor felt insecure without walls or ceilings. He had been created and trained to infiltrate human settlements, not battle wild animals. This was not the prey he was built for. The more he stayed, the more he wanted to leave. That was it. He just wanted to leave.

Blue, taking advantage of his pause, lashed out with her hind leg. He slammed the meat of her foot into his stomach, forcing a cough out of him and dislodging his grip on her. She hit the ground hard, thrashing, tail flailing, before rolling onto her feet and staggering away. The Indoraptor sank his teeth once into her flank and made to chase her, but his heart wasn't into it, and she disappeared into the brush undeterred.

The Indoraptor sank onto all fours and sniffed at the blood trail she left. The urge to chase and finish her was strong, but his discomfort was stronger. He had to return to the things that he knew.

—

 **Housekeeping: It's never said in canon, but I just want to be clear in this fic, the Indoraptor and Blue are not genetically linked. I figure they were both made with black-throated monitor lizards, which accounts for their stripes and gives them more genetic similarity. But I want them to have babies, damn it. They're not related.**

 **This is purely indulgent; I love dinosaurs, I love mentally unstable biological weapons, and I love socially awkward creatures learning how to creature. So this was born! I happened to be reading White Fang at the same time, so I tried to emulate the style. It's great for interpretations of animal behavior that aren't too anthropomorphized. Let me know what you think!**


	2. Butcher

**BUTCHER**

The nearest human settlement was a suburb, but to the Indoraptor it was set up like a buffet. One of the first things the humans had done with him was introduce the concept of a latch, and the undoing of a latch. They placed meat shanks within glass containers and starved him until he figured out how to get his next meal, tasering him when he gave up or smashed the windows. He'd learned under duress how to manipulate his dexterous hands and fingers around a handle or doorknob, to grip and turn soundlessly until he could gain entry. It was how he stole into the closest house to the forest; a quick self-taught lesson on sliding glass doors, and he was creeping inside, sickle claws tapping the laminated kitchen floor.

Instantly he felt gratified; here were walls and ceilings and chilly air conditioning, everything he was used to. The echoes from his claw taps fed him a mental map of the rooms within, and he could sense the heat radiating from two bodies upstairs.

There were two humans sleeping; he ripped them apart before they woke, splattering the walls with red. In crash dummies stuffed with meat, the scientists had taught the Indoraptor where best to tear, until every human shape and body was an exercise for his teeth. It was gruesome, and he shamelessly liked it. He used to smear blood from his meat or his own feces across the walls of his cell, at a loss for anything else to do. Each killing left in him a sense of satisfaction and gain.

House to house he crept to continue the butchery, over wooden fences and leaping from roof to roof where he could. His dark hide drank in light. In some houses, barking dogs met him at the door, dispatched with teeth or claws; in others, alarms pealed the second he entered the house, panicking him and sending him into a frenzy. Sometimes humans woke before he made it to their rooms, but their screams ceased all the same. Most of the time, there were very small humans, like Maisie Lockwood. He stopped and ate parts of those.

It was a mindless massacre. There was no limit to the Indoraptor's killing, because he had never been taught a limit. Living things were to be killed, and he was the one to do it. Nothing had ever existed with him and lived, nothing except three humans and Blue.

With a few lights on and multiple security alarms triggered in his wake, it was only a matter of time before the entire neighborhood was roused and panicked. Neighbor checked on neighbor and found slaughter; the horror was unprecedented. By the Indoraptor's sixteenth house, police cruisers were crammed bumper to bumper down the cul-de-sac, and it was becoming apparent from a clear trail of disturbance that the perpetrator was still active.

The Indoraptor padded out a former family of six's home and came face to face with the ends of dozens of handguns. Gore smeared his mouth, hands, and feet. He screamed at them, every jagged tooth and claw painted red, and the gobsmacked officers, expecting a very human serial killer and not a lab-grown hybrid dinosaur, either did not shoot or missed if they did. The Indoraptor dove among them, camouflaged by the deluge of flashing red and blue lights in the night. He ripped them apart. People were thrown against their cruisers, sometimes in pieces.

One officer scrambled into her cruiser and blared on the horn. It startled the Indoraptor into dropping the half-crushed skull of another human and turning to screech at the offending sound. It was with this opportunity that another cruiser slammed into him, knocking him end over end onto the dewy green lawn. Bullets studded his flesh, peppered his flanks and elbows. He screamed, scrambling claws tearing chunks of grass from the earth in his fervor to escape the hail of gunfire. He launched to his feet and collided with the side of the house, smearing bright red blood across the cheery yellow paint, and took off into the backyard.

The Indoraptor ran blindly until his limbs gave out, until the limp bestowed on him by a mosaic of bullet holes in his hind legs crippled him. By then he was in the forest again, still close enough to hear the distant shouts of panicked humans barking orders. He collapsed on a hump of dry wild grass, sides heaving, throat whistling. His hands shook. His wounds wept blood, and his mouth wept sobs, pained gurgles he had no instinct to hide. The Indoraptor advertised his suffering freely; he had never thought to cover up his misery, because it had never made a difference to the humans anyway.

Something in him told him that he should have stayed, and slaughtered the humans until either they all died or he did. But in him was the same swelling force that had kept him alive in his cell the past three years, had reared its head each time he was tasered or sliced open or drowned: He wanted desperately to live. He knew death waited when his body reached its limit; he had tasted it often, electrocuted until he vomited blood or drowned to test his stamina until he felt like even his mind was floating. Death clung to the jagged ribs sticking forever out of his sides, was there in every whistling, pneumonic breath. Escaping it for just another day eclipsed any training.

The Indoraptor was beginning to think that the humans brought death wherever they went. Suddenly, life in the forest felt quite tempting.

Before he could set to work picking out the bullets from his hide, he scented a newcomer and bristled. Blue padded out of the darkness, her eyes green discs in the moonlight. She stood a safe distance away and sniffed the air, head weaving on the end of her neck. The Indoraptor snarled, offended by her presence in the midst of his misery. He was threatened and humiliated by her fighting superiority.

But Blue made no move to fight, despite the fresh wounds on her neck and back. She merely stood there, sniffing at him and staring at him. The Indoraptor stared back. Compared to the bullets embedded in his flesh, her stare seemed laughably survivable.

Blue took one step forward, and the Indoraptor smiled at her. She stumbled back, lips curling back to reveal her own teeth. Smiling was something the Indoraptor picked up from the humans who approached his cell. Pearly white smiles were what greeted him every time he was tasered, when the guards banged on the bars and laughed when he flinched. When he manipulated the muscles around his mouth and smiled back at them, they always became so quiet. And usually, they left in a hurry.

He didn't mean to intimidate Blue, for once. He merely wanted to signal her to keep away, and he was shocked that it worked. Communicating with Blue felt as impossible as understanding the humans, but now, he could somehow see the similarities. She too tapped a sickle claw against the earth, and she too stood both tall and straight, and she too had a tail that lashed anxiously through the air.

Blue was seeing it too. The Indoraptor's pained cries were what drew her, and seeing him finally prone and pliant is what made her stay. She was perplexed at him, raptor and not raptor. Every time she tried to recognize him as one of her kind, the dissimilarities grew in prominence: his too-big head, his lipless mouth, his apish forelimbs and armored spine. He was an oddity.

She tilted her head to the left. The Indoraptor mirrored her, and tilted his head to the right. She tilted her head to the right. He tilted his head to the left.

That she could recognize, the acknowledgement that what she did was seen and responded to. He was not a brick wall but a sponge, too long dry but learning. And inevitably, the more they had in common — and the more the both of them realized it — the less likely it was that he would come bursting out of the brush to attack her again. So Blue did what she had done with the Tyrannosaurus; she hid her needle-sharp teeth behind her lips, stood tall and clearly seen, and warbled. She demonstrated clearly that she would make no moves, neither should he, and hopefully mutual ignorance would flourish.

Blue turned and padded back to the bushes, though she didn't disappear; rather, she slunk to the underbrush downwind to keep an eye on the Indoraptor. And the Indoraptor, thinking himself alone, turned to the mess that was his legs and, as he set to work clawing the bullets from his flesh, did a very unraptorish thing: he began to regret.

The Indoraptor was a homeless predator. His attempt to return to the familiar and what his training and torture had prepared him for had ended with his near death. To make another attempt felt impossible, and he was frustrated at his own foolishness. What had he intended to do, beg for the cage and the taser and the tank? Throw himself on the cold metal table to be vivisected without anesthetic one more time? He'd learned an important lesson: the instant gratification of a kill was not worth his carelessness in getting discovered by humans with the means to harm him. He would need to remember this for his second attempt.

A second attempt? The thought flickered and died as he realized his foolishness again. The pain of the bullet moving around in his flank beneath his probing claw was a sharp reminder of why he wished sincerely to never see a human again. The drive to infiltrate urban settings was artificially implanted by every meaningless test he was put through. Matched against the consequences of a real-life application, the legitimacy of those tests evaporated.

He was supposed to be rewarded for this, not punished.

But the alternative was that the Indoraptor now had no place and now purpose. The humans were never interested in giving him a life beyond testing their weapon for the next batch of better, healthier raptors. Unbeknownst to him, they'd intended to end his short, meaningless life after the auction that would whet the appetites of those who wanted to use his genetic descendants.

The Indoraptor was not supposed to be alive. And though he didn't know these facts for certain or the intent of the humans who had created him, he felt it still, in limbo between the violence he'd created and the eerie wilderness of the forest, and the creatures within it. He didn't belong to either world.

The Indoraptor's entire body stung by the time he extracted the last bullet, his hide a good deal more scratched up than it was before he started. He rested, neck limp and eyes closed to the pain, too tired to even clean the blood from his claws and jaws. In the distance, where police cruiser lights still flashed, civilians cried out their confusion and devastation. They were caught unawares, totally undeserving of the mindless slaughter that had visited in the night.

And as humans tend to do, they mobilized to end the threat.

—

When Blue saw the Indoraptor creep out of the forest and approach the water's edge, she whistled a warning high in her throat. Her maw was coated with red from dining on her kill, a mule deer, on a rocky island in the midst of a rapid river. The Indoraptor didn't respond, though he could hear her whine over the water's dull roar; he just reared up tall on his still-raw hind legs and stared. After a minute of eyeing each other up, Blue warily resumed eating, but kept a diligent orange eye on him at all times.

The Indoraptor continued to watch her, noting how picky she was, extracting the liver, heart, and kidneys first before ripping chunks from muscle. His eyes mapped out her killing strike: deep teeth marks on the base of the skull, gouges carved out by her sickle claws on the soft sides behind the rib cage. The hunt itself had taken place deeper in the forest, but she'd dragged the carcass here to eat undisturbed. All of these details made sense to the Indoraptor upon seeing them in action, but he could never have thought of them all himself.

His stomach rumbled for fresh blood, but he let her be, not eager to be reminded how awful he was at fighting other predators. Even deer gave him trouble, running far faster than he had the breath to chase and lashing out with kicks he could never predict. And ever since he'd decided to follow Blue — a decision not wholly, consciously made, but really was a product of his homelessness — he was experimenting with what mutual peace could bring.

The Indoraptor filled his mouth with water and let it flow down his throat a few times, shaking drops off his teeth, then leapt with difficulty to some rocks at the center of the rapids some distance below Blue. Blue straightened up and masked the curious look she gave him by swallowing a hunk of meat with a jerk of her head. There the Indoraptor turned downstream and hugged the top of the rock, mouth open and ready for fish to come flying. It had taken a while before he'd successfully copied the bear's trick, but now he'd gotten the hang of it reliably enough to acquire a taste for salmon.

Tolerating the presence of another in close vicinity took some getting used to, but the Indoraptor found that he could ignore Blue if he tried. Blue, too, eventually eased, gratified that her message from a few nights ago had gotten through; they were to leave each other be. And though she would make no overt moves, a part of her was satisfied to share space with another. It had been too long since she'd seen her sisters, heard their chatter and bickering. The Indoraptor's clumsy attempts at being a living thing would have to do.

A salmon flew flailing out of the water, and the Indoraptor snapped it out of the air, tipping his head back to let it slide down his gullet whole. Another followed soon after, then another. Sated — sick of vomiting when he overate, the Indoraptor had learned to quit while he was ahead — he grabbed one more and gripped it with his claws, pinning it against the rock until it stopped struggling. He picked it up by the head in his mouth and whipped it around, enjoying the swing of its weight and the flash of its scales.

During a flip of his head, the Indoraptor glimpsed a close presence, jumped, and turned. Blue had halved the distance between them and stood on the edge of a rock, her body tilted forward, eyes and nose at attention to understand what he was doing. After a pause, the Indoraptor continued playing. He accidentally bit the fish in half, so he waited for another to come flying out and resumed his play with that one.

Blue peered closely at the carcass of the bisected fish. On an impulse, the Indoraptor tossed his head and flung the salmon in his mouth up at her. She scrambled back as it landed limp on the rock, then crept forward to sniff and lick it, not knowing what it was. Red meat was her sole diet in the paddock and in the wild; she had never thought to foray into seafood.

Blue looked back up at him and vocalized. It was a short, inquisitive chirp, a question. Her sisters would have indulged her, and led her to the source of an interesting scent on their feet, or nosed a bone in her direction. What she wanted from the Indoraptor was direction on what to do with the strange, slippery creature before her.

But to the Indoraptor, this was noise. He just stared. Blue asked again, and he blinked slowly. She rasped, an expression of frustration and disappointment. This too was foreign to the Indoraptor. He had never before communicated through voice, and had no grasp for what she desired.

Feeling like he was missing something, the Indoraptor parted his jaws and gurgled, chattered a long stream of croaks and grunts. He simply opened his mouth and let his throat rumble, untempered into something intelligible. It was nonsense, garbled garbage. Blue leaned back and cocked her head, eyes wide. There was nothing hostile about the meaningless tirade, but it wasn't something she could understand.

She looked between the fish and him again. Restless, the Indoraptor scooped the bisected fish's head up with his teeth and tossed it toward her too. Its body, trailing blood and water, followed. Blue twitched back, confused, and in her confusion decided to take part in this strange game, and with lips curled back, she grasped the whole fish's tail and tossed it back down at him.

This continued a few times, Blue copying the Indoraptor out of sheer bewilderment and the Indoraptor making it up as he went along, until a well-lobbed fish from Blue landed smack on his nose instead of into his teeth. He shook it off, snorting; it disappeared into the water beside him. He rubbed his snout against the rock, then into his palm.

Blue crouched and crept as close as possible to the edge of the rock overhang separating them. They would be close enough to touch if the Indoraptor stretched himself upward, which after a moment of hesitation is exactly what he did. Neck stretched forward like a heron's, the Indoraptor padded to the overhang and stood tall to reach Blue. Unimaginably tense, they sniffed noses, eyes wide and watching for a sudden move. The Indoraptor could feel Blue's exhales against his snout. Suddenly her face so close to his violently overwhelmed him. He snorted and leapt back, jaw open and head twitching. His scales itched.

Blue regarded him, tail swishing, confused at what she might have done to make him recoil. She tossed a fish tail from her end, but the Indoraptor backed away from it and didn't reciprocate.

Recognizing distress, Blue stuck her neck out and crooned. It was the same steady croak she gave Owen Grady when he feigned sobs, the same she offered her sisters when one suffered the worse end of a squabble. She kept it going, and after a moment, the Indoraptor raised his shaking head and imitated the noise, wobbly at first before smoothing into another croon.

Blue made the inquisitive noise again. The Indoraptor copied it. She called, enticing him to step closer again; _that_ noise he knew, and he replied in kind. But he'd had enough for one day. He reluctantly turned away and leapt back to the shoreline, disappearing into the brush to seek shade. Blue coughed a call; he called back.

Each knowing where the other was, they returned to their own devices.

—

The morning dawned cloudless and clear. Birds sang the morning chorus to a gently waking forest, and yolk-yellow sunlight illuminated the dust and dew in the air between the mountains' foothills. The animals of the wood rose languidly, visiting creeks for their morning water and snuffling the early air. The Indoraptor, up for hours before the sunrise, stalked adjacent, observing and learning them as he followed Blue from a passive distance.

All belied what would come.

When the beat of whirring helicopters echoed in the distance, the Indoraptor slunk beneath bushes and warbled. He didn't recognize the creatures that made those even, pulsing thuds, but they were too rhythmic to be natural, reminding him of the generators in the rooms near his old cell. Humans must be making them.

He hid, and Blue hid, and that is what saved them from the initial sweeps of troops in full military regalia, searching for the black-scaled murderer that had taken dozens of lives. When they found no murderer nor his tracks, they withdrew, and the forest life deemed it safe to creep out again.

As the late afternoon heat beat down, the Indoraptor crammed himself beneath a mossy overhang and dozed, contorted awkwardly to keep his marred rump out of the dirt. When he woke, his heart began to pound. Something was wrong.

He stuck his head out into the sunlight and blinked around. He heard no birdsong, and smelled no fresh tracks, not even those of lizards or mice. Flocks of fleeing birds called to each other frantically in the distance, peeling away from the forest. As the Indoraptor watched, a herd of deer raced right by him, paying him no mind, even when he perked up and jumped up to chase them before the odd atmosphere killed any desire he had for hunting.

Blue, too, was long gone; the Indoraptor could barely pick up her scent, and he grew distressed, realizing how alone he was. They hadn't approached each other since he had fished by the river, but following her around was most of what his days consisted of.

The Indoraptor wandered in circles, aware enough to be disconcerted but too ignorant to flee. He did not yet possess the common sense to make himself scarce where others had deemed it wise to do so themselves, and instead tried to investigate their absences himself. And when a scent that set his heart to racing came floating through the trees, the Indoraptor approached it.

The heady scent grew stronger until it filled the air, choking the forest with smog. A faint orange glow grew between the tree trunks before him. The Indoraptor had never before encountered fire, but could tell immediately that he didn't like it. It reminded him of the residue in the air after guns were fired. It flickered in a stretched mass before him, lazily climbing the fire ladder into the canopy with each tree it consumed. Crown to crown it leapt, snapping, filling the sky with a dull roar.

The Indoraptor turned tail and trotted away, his weak lungs beginning to twinge. When he looked over his shoulder and saw the fire spreading after him, he broke into a panicked run, rasping. He booked it for higher ground, the air thickening all around him.

Halfway up a steep slope, the Indoraptor was surrounded by orange. He stopped to pant, muscles shaking, and turned to watch fearfully the smoke rising thick and torrential from the burning forest. The flames licked the bottom of the hill; the Indoraptor pushed himself upward before they could advance on him further. But a flurry of heat and rumbling drew his eye again. The fire was chasing him up. Treetop to treetop it ate, climbing the slope faster than he had run it, a blistering inferno of death.

The Indoraptor took off, cawing in terror. No matter where he raced, more fire blocked his path. It was all around him and beneath him now, sucking the oxygen from his lungs, scorching his scales with agonizing tongues of flame. The heat and smoke were spears to his weeping eyes. Nowhere was safe to step, to touch. The sky was orange, the ground was orange, the horizon was a wall of orange, broken only by the black husks of stripped trees.

The Indoraptor fled in circles, screaming, the soles of his feet scorching with every step, searching in vain for an escape. His heart pounded on fumes, then on empty; a panicked inhale sucked in nothing but smoke, and so did those that followed. He gagged, crouched and tucked in on himself, baking in an oven of fire with no way out.

But faintly through the rushing roar of fire came a raspy bark.

He coughed a weak reply, and a chorus of barks came from somewhere to his left. He staggered to his feet and stampeded in that direction, eyes closed to slits. His chest begged for air; his muscles, for energy. His legs pumped with no fuel but he forced them to carry him anyway, tearing blindly through the burning forest toward the call.

All at once he broke into a clearer area, and fresh air poured into his lungs like ice water. He collapsed on his stomach, mouth gaping and gasping, his heartbeat racing so fast it was almost like one continuous thrum. Still the bark sounded ahead of him, so he dragged himself to his feet again and forced himself to move. When he had the breath to do so, he barked back.

Back and forth the two raptors called, at once racing and leading each other out of the death trap set by the humans. The air was too blackened for them to see where they were going, but the ground took them up and down, across hillsides and through meadows of crackling, foggy grass. When the smog was blue with spent smoke they could glimpse each other, the silhouettes of sprinting legs off to their sides, the curved bend of a neck.

The Indoraptor's entire body sang with hurt and exhaustion. He slowed, then stopped on a cliff far from the inferno. Blue stopped and panted beside him. He watched the fire devour the woods on the back of the mountain he'd just escaped, a glowing boil that ate green and left nothing but black. The humans had taken advantage of the dry forest to flush him out to their guns or kill him. They would have succeeded if Blue had not turned back for him.

The Indoraptor and Blue looked at each other. He rasped, and Blue's jaws parted to lick the tip of his snout.

—

 **listen you can't tell me they made an entire ass dinosaur bulletproof**

 **Thank you to everyone who reviewed! I hope you enjoyed; let me know what you think!**


	3. Featherbrain

**FEATHERBRAIN**

Traveling with a companion was not something the Indoraptor was used to, and traveling with a completely inept lab-grown creature was not Blue's forte either. Miscommunication and frustration were the third and fourth companions in their blind dive deeper into the forest.

Day and night they traveled, going opposite whenever they saw building lights or heard the rumble of engines. They orbited each other, Blue striding on with determination and the Indoraptor trailing as though pulled by a magnet. The fire had killed the distance between them. Their destination was unknown, but each time they made to settle down, they remembered as one the burst shots of gunfire and the heat of the flames, and grew restless, until they channeled it into more traveling.

Blue was wily to the way humans operated, how they could return over and over to work their devices. Three years had passed in solitude on the island before she saw Owen Grady again. She did not trust the old territory just outside the manor. The Indoraptor had none of these instincts or experiences, but he knew by now that Blue was wiser, and wisdom is what he lacked in keeping himself alive. He followed her without question.

Blue did her best to act aloof and confident with the Indoraptor pacing right beside her, but he was three times her size and oblivious to the act. He stuck his snout in her face constantly, sniffing and staring, watching her like a child given permission to play within a museum exhibit. His mind buzzed with the overstimulation of a creature nearby, but it didn't drive him to want to kill her; rather, he was beset with curiosity, at her birdlike, upright gait and the straight planes of her face. He couldn't follow quietly. He had to pick each interaction apart like he could inspect it with his apish forelimbs. Blue was constantly on the cusp of regretting going back for this overbearing, doggish raptor.

When he probed his nose too close, she, not one to let such an overstep go, punished him with a snap and a squall. And he, not recognizing this as a boundary-setting, unwilling to take such punishment, responded in kind but with more ferocity. Several times a day did they chase each other around thus, until their respective rages cooled.

Multiple times they almost separated, when the tension mounted too high. But it began to get better. Blue hunted most of the time, for she was better at it, and gave up quickly on trying to get him involved when she barked commands her sisters would have leapt at and the Indoraptor just blinked. He was slow, loud, and conspicuous. He didn't stalk, just came screaming out of the bushes after prey. She left him behind and came back later with a kill she'd share.

Then there was sleep. It took some getting used to, sleeping in the open with someone touching the Indoraptor. The first few times, he bolted awake with a scream as his subconscious warned him danger was nearby, badly startling Blue. Visions of human silhouettes behind the bars waking him with jabs and electric shocks swam in the back of his mind.

And then there were other tense times that neither of them could explain. Blue allowed the Indoraptor to stand nearby when it was clear he wouldn't blindly attack anymore, but sometimes he demanded the opposite, with no warning or reason; he would fall into a mood of crouching, shaking, and wide-eyed screaming. He screamed when she approached, not from anger but from fear. It scared Blue as badly as the Indoraptor was scared of her contact. His flayed nerves were so sure that any touch would end in pain, that even the heat coming off her body from feet away was unbearable. His eyes and throat begged for distance, which she had to respect until the strange attack passed.

Every time she hunted alone, Blue missed stalwart, loyal Delta, always at her side and ready to leap at her command. Every time the Indoraptor stuck his nose where it shouldn't belong, Blue missed Charlie, the gentle-natured and admiring, forever seeking out a snuggle from the big sister she looked up to so much. His stalking of her even evoked Echo, who was sullen but ingenious at sneaking behind where the other three were pinning prey to deliver the final blow. The phantoms of her missing pack made her all the more resentful of him.

He was a burden in every sense of the word. When Blue found him to be too annoying, she sought escape in broad meadows. She felt at home in the tall grass with the sun beating down, but the Indoraptor, curiously, viewed such environments as inherent threats. He circled her from the shadows, head twitching, not hunting her, but repelled by the open space surrounding her.

One midday, after a particularly frustrating episode where the Indoraptor had devoured most of the kill Blue brought back without a thought for letting her have the good bits as she deserved for hunting it, she padded to the middle of a clearing and settled down among the flowers for a doze. She was unafraid of predators; she'd encountered both bears and wolves, and they were so frightened of her strange appearance that they gave her no trouble. The therapods from Isla Nublar didn't bother hunting other carnivores, save for the cantankerous _Tyrannosaurus rex_ , and the ones not bought at the auction had dispersed far and wide.

To her left, the Indoraptor paced back and forth under the canopy. He kept a red eye on her at all times, restless at their distance but unwilling to expose himself to the sun. He switched between four legs and two with each turn, sometimes approaching the sunbaked grass, only to retreat again with a twitch of his hands.

Blue cracked an eyelid to watch the curves of his back slink by, then shut it. Her head tilted in little turns as she listened to the wind and enjoyed the sun baking the back of her neck. She was an endotherm, not dependent on the sun but supplemented and cleansed by it nonetheless.

The Indoraptor resented its blanketing touch. His scales were caked with years of upbringing in the dark and the damp, and he was loath to leave the predictability of tight spaces. But here was Blue, so confident she was falling asleep. There was some great knowledge she was privy to that he wasn't. At once he was in momentary, muted awe. Blue's confidence was a monolith that rose taller than her physical stature. It was the same assuredness that felled elk with calculated movements, that let her read the land and carried her feet to precise footfalls. Her power was immense.

Not for the first time, the Indoraptor felt foolish. Though his belly was full and it felt good, he felt the sting of some unknown committed wrong when Blue had returned from drinking to find the deer nearly devoured, and chattered angrily of her wasted energy before storming off. It was another gap in his knowledge. He simply had no experience in anything. He only knew the regimented cruelty of man and the senselessness of their experiments, but he was lost in the careless lottery of nature. It made sense only in hindsight that Blue should get the kill she was owed. He'd thought only of his own hunger. And now he thought only of sunlight as a phantom, when really it should chase such monsters away.

The Indoraptor placed a paw into the sunlight. Then another. He crept into the open with his spine curved toward the ground, lowest where light met dark, as though crawling under a barrier. His red eyes fluttered their third eyelids, keeping them clear to see the inevitable jump out at him.

But nothing, inevitably, came. The Indoraptor in all his discomfort crept slowly to Blue's side, tense as a drawn string, and peered down at her folded body. He lowered his belly to the ground and tucked his limbs to his sides, mimicking comfort he didn't feel.

Blue, a little put out, peeked down at him as he settled. He was stiff as a board with his neck stuck out, eyes wide and nostrils puffing. In contrast to his awe of her, Blue only found him confusing. She didn't know what predator he feared; in her experience, meadows had been nothing but pleasant. It was from meadows that she observed the humans on the catwalk above her with her sisters, and it was from meadows that she took to resting once alone, ears always alert for a threat that would have to come bellowing from the forest very far away and seen.

Another thing drew Blue's eye: a fattened tick, drinking hungrily from the Indoraptor's neck, right in the middle of his gold stripe. Without thinking, Blue leaned over and picked it off with her teeth. The Indoraptor, tense as he was, squawked and whipped out of her reach, jaws snapping by her snout. She stared him down, ready to jump if he did, crunching down the swollen bloodsucker.

The Indoraptor peered at her teeth, then calmed quite suddenly when he realized what she'd done. He knew the tick had been there, but had been unable to interrupt its drinking; his claws were too shaky to close on it, and he couldn't curl his neck around to bite at it, and not even rubbing his neck against a surface could dislodge it. So he'd bitterly settled for living with it, reaching up to feel the loose bump with his knuckles every so often and be reminded of his passenger. Even the colonies of ticks that had taken up residence in his armpits and underbelly wouldn't move, for his lipless, gapped teeth were ill-suited for the precision work of picking off insects, and he had to settle for scratching them off, suffering bloody cuts in the process. He was prisoner to the minor discomfort.

Slowly, the Indoraptor sank back down, and allowed Blue to nose around his arm for more ticks. Her thin, close-set teeth and narrow nose were as tweezers to the colony. Soon enough he was stretched out on his side, watching the clouds go by above while Blue enjoyed a little feast from his loose skin. He twitched with every sudden movement, but did not react badly to her proximity to his exposed belly; he had not the instinct to protect it.

She didn't stop there; his scales flaked in plenty of places, soon to be nowhere as Blue tugged free the ill-shed patches that had stuck to his new scales after his previous shed. She removed from him burrs and hooked barbs. She inspected him with the same diligent eye she'd cast over her sisters, and as she worked she daydreamed of when the four of them clustered together in the evening after a feed, flanks to shoulders and heads all risen to each other's, preening and play-biting and soliciting nuzzles.

To the Indoraptor, it felt pretty good. He no longer had to feel the bumps when he brushed his arm against his own body. A great idea popped into his head: reciprocation, so he rolled back onto his belly and nosed around Blue's shoulder. Not only was she tick-less, but his mouth was no more effective in grooming her than it was himself. He sniffed her helplessly. He bumped his nose into the base of her neck and kept it there.

They stayed in silence for a long, still moment. It was a first for the both of them. Blue was torn between pushing him away and tolerating this sudden affection, so she sat there in silence, indecisive and waiting for him to move. The Indoraptor, meanwhile, had momentarily lost himself in his first gentle gesture. He wasn't yet to know the pleasures of nuzzling and head-rubs, but her body heat felt good against his sensitive face, so he kept it there.

After a minute, Blue conceded to reach around and nibble good-naturedly at his jaw. He stilled, thinking she was grooming him more; when she didn't he slid his snout up until he clumsily nuzzled her jaw back. Blue rewarded him with a content croon. The vibration felt good, so he carefully rested his face where it was strongest, on the side of her neck by her throat. He could hear the rush of her heartbeat here.

Blue tolerated him, with less irritation than previous. Her mood was calm enough to abide his odd mannerisms. By raptor standards he was ugly as sin, his voice warped and head all deformed, but just as she'd done with the Indominus, she could sense her own kind in him. She couldn't know the link between the two hybrids, but sometimes when the light struck him wrong, at the odd turn of his head or the occasional too-quick noise, Blue saw not the Indoraptor but instead the shadow of the great white beast, and it would spook her into maintaining distance between them.

As Blue contemplated this in her own distracted way, the Indoraptor became aware of a minor discomfort of his own. With every inhale of Blue's body heat, it grew stronger. He peeked an eye open, sighted a steely-white throat, and a flash of color and sound burst in his head. It was a memory.

His body was frail, and he was so very small, and everything else was white. White above his head, white beneath his body, and white beside his face, pebbled white, quilled white. A second body pulsed beside his. Eyes. Neck. Twitching thumbs. They leaned against each other, sleeping under the oppressive blanket of early youth, warm and weak and helpless.

Each time he opened his eyes he saw his white brother, and each time he fell asleep he did so leaning on him. But he woke one last time to tangy metal in the air — his first time scenting blood. It was leaking from his brother's mouth. It gleamed red as a cherry against his pale cheek. His brother's head shook. His eyes rolled. He opened his mouth and vomited his insides.

There was noise, and there were gloved hands, which parted the Indoraptors in frantic haste. The Indoraptor dangled, head lolling, and stared down at his white brother, prone, his stark, wet intestines still attached to him at the teeth, his red eye bulging and lightless.

The Indoraptor lifted his head from Blue and rasped in distress, dread convincing him of an enemy. But the enemy was his far-off memory. He'd escaped death in the form of deformity at birth, escaped it when it sought to impale him on bone, and escaped its tongues of hungry fire. A font of toothed memories bit his nerves.

Blue, curious, turned and, with hesitation, bumped her snout against his. Somehow, it shook him back into reality. It would not be the last time.

—

In their travels they came upon a rocky beach, different levels of tide revealed in strips of seaweed across the sand. They both tasted the sea, only to find it unpalatable. Blue preened on a rock while the Indoraptor waded through the shallow waves, dipping his head underwater to sample mussels, crabs, and slow fish. Between feasts the Indoraptor felt a great rousing excitement as each wave broke against his legs, which crested and culminated in a mad dash up and down the surf, body low to the ground and feet frothing against the water. He croaked and warbled, biting at the splashes his feet made. Blue watched him for a while, then joined in, chasing the water as it receded back into the ocean and fleeing from the next wave, back and forth.

When they forayed back into the forest to nap, Blue suddenly coughed a warning and ducked. The Indoraptor obeyed, an impulse newly automatic, sniffing the air for whatever she sensed.

He felt it before he saw it: rhythmic thuds vibrating up into his feet, setting his heart to pounding. Then a massive shape strode out of the darkness before them. The Indoraptor saw rows of banana-shaped teeth under a scarred lip and shuddered, torn between attacking and staying hidden.

The _Tyrannosaurus_ turned to peer at them, her eyes glinting in the shade. They didn't know it, but her name was Roberta. And Roberta peered directly at them with the leery gaze of a queen. All the worst parts of Gila monster, cane toad, and cassowary were combined in her creation to make her one tough customer. The scars marring her scaly hide were proofs of her age and might, and the experiences she'd survived and thrived in had made her confident and merciless. _Tyrannosaurs_ of old could live like Blue did, killing only what they needed to and ignoring other creatures all other times. But not Roberta. She knew deep in her bones that the presence of another was an intolerable offense. She'd made a living hell of the lives of the predators on Isla Nublar, orphaning the juvenile _Allosaurus,_ making game of _Carnotaurs,_ laying indiscriminate waste to herbivores of all kinds. The sole _Giganotosaurus,_ Gertrude, was covered in scars from the battles she and Roberta had wound up in, before the volcano eruption claimed Gertrude's life.

In her days of loneliness following the Indominus battle, Blue had latched onto Roberta for a time, dogging her steps as she explored the newly relinquished island. She left when it was clear Roberta was nothing but a danger who wanted to be alone. From there she stalked _Allosaurs,_ who chased her from their kills, and the family of _Carnotaurs,_ who were generally docile but still suspicious of the small predator. She even in her desperation tormented the _Baryonyx_ Beatrice, swiping kills from her until her skin was flush against her bones, which would later lead to her desperation in pursuing Claire Dearing and Franklin Webb through lava.

Blue, Roberta recognized, and with reason could tolerate. But she did not recognize this black newcomer beside her, and a rumble rose in her saggy throat as she prepared to prove her hierarchy. Blue sensed trouble, and with a quick command she and the Indoraptor were bolting through the trees, their ears ringing with Roberta's bellow. It took them a while to lose her, and they panicked the entire time.

With this territory clearly taken, Blue and the Indoraptor set off as soon as they caught their breath.

After a few more days of wandering, the Indoraptor and Blue came upon a dilapidated house nestled in the elbow of two mountain ridges. Its front doors were rotted from their hinges, and most furniture was tipped over. Seasons of rain had washed a layer of mud and uprooted vegetation across the living room floor, while a great hole had rotted from the floor of the upstairs bedroom, forming a passageway down to the living room. The Indoraptor paced up and down on four legs, sniffing out every floorboard, while Blue peeked into cabinets and ripped up some of the couch stuffing. In the end, the Indoraptor curled up in a corner by the sofa and closed his eyes. The structure fulfilled his undying need for the comfort of a manmade shelter, and Blue was reminded of her paddock as well. The house was theirs.

—

Side by side with Blue, walking in her footsteps, the Indoraptor could finally live as a wild predator. When she hunted, he learned to take her cues, and when she explored he followed. Through gullies filled with deposited soil and tree trunks, and over the craggy foothills of mountains covered in dense redwoods, the two explored.

Finally, the Indoraptor became useful. He was beginning to understand most of her calls. They developed a system where he would rush loudly upon a herd of deer, forcing them to flee to where Blue hid waiting to deliver the killing blow on whoever was nearest. This system proved almost always effective, and the pair never went hungry for long. Game was plentiful, both furred and scaled. Some dinosaurs had escaped into the deep forest here too, and taking the slowest of the herd down could feed them for weeks.

But most of all, a predator's life appeared to be sleeping. The two returned to the rundown house to pick apart their kills and slumber. They were most active at dawn and dusk, and passed the hot midday and deep cool night by sleeping, flank to flank, Blue settled upright with her chin tucked to her chest, and the Indoraptor stretched out beside her on his side like a dog.

The Indoraptor felt a void where there had been anticipation for the next training, the next hurt. Blue filled it. There was dozing, there was preening, and there was hunting, all of them involving her. And that was it. The Indoraptor could do whatever he wished. He would never have to hurt again if he so wished.

And under this new, salubrious lifestyle, the Indoraptor did something he had never done before. He thrived. Muscle and fat layered his bones, filled the pits in his skeletal face. His limbs thickened. The whistle disappeared from his breath as his pneumonia was finally defeated by the fresh, dry air. Under frequent sun his scales darkened from dull gray to inky black, near-iridescent, and the gold stripe running from his jaw to the tip of his tail not only deepened, but broadened. Splotches of gold sprang up all over his body like bacterial colonies, until his scales were nearly piebald with patches. Some dotted his cheeks and muzzle like human freckles.

The quills adorning his head, rump, and elbows revealed their true identity as pinfeathers. They began with a little white fuzz at their very tips, then sprouted as the wax encasing them fell away over time. More popped up on either side of his hard spine. Before long, the Indoraptor sported twin trails of snowy white feathers on his back, thickest behind his head and atop his rump, and began to molt them regularly. Further, they continued down his tail and ringed the tip with a snowy spade; and further still they spread from his elbows all the way down to his wrists, forming a broad vane of rudimentary wing feathers that draped from his upper arms like loose sleeves.

The first time Blue saw them she picked them, thinking them an addition to her grooming routine. But his pained squeals stopped her. No feathers had been present on herself or her sisters, but some gap in his genetic code happened to be filled where hers had not, despite the numerous other holes in his DNA. Ironically, the hybridized Indoraptor began to look more like a legitimate _Deinonychus_ of old than Blue did.

The Indoraptor moved through social stages like a hatchling in fast forward. He accepted gentleness and playfulness into his movements. He understood her chattering until he could respond to it, though his voice was always one uglier, raspier with hybridization. His chuffs and gurgles could signal _all is well_ and _leave me be_ and _play._ And play was the best thing of all. It got his heart thumping as though on a hunt, yet had no risk of hurt, at least none that couldn't be assuaged with an apologetic nuzzle. The Indoraptor could sprawl next to Blue for hours, heads raised like the necks of loons, shoving cheeks and pretend-snapping in lazy fun. He growled now only in jest. They chased each other back and forth, dodging and weaving, running in circles from the house living room, up the stairs, down through the hole in the ceiling, and back again. And his favorite, though unraptorish game was sprawling full-body on top of Blue and seeing how long it took for her to escape.

Blue hated that game.

But those were just the games Blue had taught him. The Indoraptor in his isolation had grown inward, developing an odd fixation on his surroundings that Blue lacked. So when the two rested beside a shallow river one evening, it was the Indoraptor who suddenly leapt to his feet and sniffed back and forth along the shore, one eye fixated on the water, then the other.

Blue watched, waiting for her companion she knew to be often strange to reveal what he saw. The Indoraptor scrutinized the bottom of the riverbank, splashing into the shallows and retreating again, before taking off upstream. He leapt atop a rock above the water and looked down. Beneath him the ground inclined sharply and the water flowed irregularly around a series of rocks, sending its torrent concentrated into a shallow trough adjacent to the river's main artery.

The Indoraptor, in fits and starts, let himself slide off the rock face. He landed on all fours at the mouth of the trough, water splashing up his ribs, and slid down the smooth rock of the river's bottom, a screech in his throat. He picked up speed until he wobbled, sure he'd fall, and the slide unceremoniously dumped him into the river's main flow again.

Water rushing in his ears, the Indoraptor came up for air, doggy-paddling, and scrambled back on shore to race up and slide again. He went down three more times, once flipping onto his back halfway down and finding the helplessness of the position bizarrely more fun, before Blue finally got to her feet and slowly padded up to his launching pad. Shaking water from his head, the Indoraptor thundered to her side, warbling in delight that she would try his game.

She hopped onto the rock and leaned over the edge, nostrils trembling; the Indoraptor, overzealous in taking his turn, and also impatient for her to discover his fun, leapt up behind her too close. So precariously was Blue perched that only the slightest nudge toppled her forward. She landed with a started caw, rump first, in the water and flew down the slide, shrieking the entire time.

The waterslide tumbled her end over end once she met the greater river, and she came up sputtering, kicking her legs like a baby duck. She took only one breath before the Indoraptor slammed into her, having flown in directly behind her. Twice dunked and thoroughly miffed, Blue kicked awkwardly to the shoreline and shook herself off, rasping furiously that her dignity should be so ruffled. She snapped at the Indoraptor when he came up behind her for a nuzzle. She didn't forget that shove.

But Blue's stung feelings didn't last long, because she tried the waterslide again and again, alternating with the Indoraptor until they grew tired. They sprawled in the shade, waiting for the Indoraptor's waterlogged feathers to dry, as he rubbed his cheek against the back of her neck. She purred, half-dozing and enjoying the scratches.

The Indoraptor closed his eyes. He drifted into the casual intimacy of all five senses engaged. He listened to the rush of the water beside them, to the birdsong and rustling wind high above and the warble of Blue's purr under his ear. Sunlight dappled their hides where it poked through the canopy. His steadily pulsing nostrils took in flower pollen and faint game trails. The grass beneath them was a soft, lush bed.

He thought of nothing, and wanted for nothing, and waited for nothing. He was no longer the Raptor, and the world was not All Else; he was not the antagonistic cynosure of his own story. The world existed, and he existed with it, nothing but a drop in the ocean of collective nature. And he reveled in being so blissfully unimportant. His first three years of life felt like a bad dream, and the times he'd woken screaming from one to be comforted by Blue were growing fewer. Some deep, deep part of him rebelled at the memories of his imprisonment, somehow aware that a great injustice had been committed, atypical and wrong. This was what life was supposed to be. And he had found it. The stares, and the lightning, and the cage had never felt so far away.

—

The Indoraptor didn't have a word for love, nor did any creature besides man, and he didn't need to dwell on it. He was an animal; only through action and feeling was the concept expressed. Slowly but all at once, the two raptors had become the epicenters of each other's lives. Solitude at this point was unthinkable.

Unthinkable too was distance. The greedy Indoraptor hadn't panicked at Blue's touch in months, and instead coveted every inch of scale they pressed together. Nothing they did was ever enough. He slept often with his chin across her back. When Blue preened him he couldn't help but curl closer and closer, until he was wrapped neck to tail around her body. A raspy croon was ever in his throat when she was there, rumbling louder when she drew near and subsiding to a low purr as she departed. He craned his neck toward her as she passed as though guided by a magnet, drinking in her indulgent nuzzle or nip with bliss.

But Blue was no less devoted, though she was more casual about it. She refused to budge unless he came along with her. If he dreamed and twitched across the floor in his sleep, she would restlessly wake and waddle to his side again. This ugly, overgrown, brutish raptor was her ugly, overgrown, brutish raptor, her pack-mate, the only barrier between isolation and herself.

When the Indoraptor woke shrieking, with lightning racing through the memories of his veins, swallowing after every breath and dead certain he would soon on the back of his throat taste the blood that came before his voided insides, Blue woke and chittered to him, nuzzling and grooming his face and neck to remind him he was here, and whole, and unhurt.

When Blue's gut roiled with longing for what the Indoraptor had never seen — a paddock, a chorus of raspy voices — and she rose in the dark night to wander, calling without end for what could never come back, the Indoraptor followed faithfully at her side, a warm and steady shadow, ready to guide her home when the episode passed.

If they could have them, there would be laughs ever in their throats, smiles always across their jaws. Continental life was treating them generously. Perhaps they would be safer in the long run still on one of the isles, but so deep in the redwoods had they wandered that it would take an infeasible amount of equipment and dedication to find them. If they were lucky - and luck had been a close companion to the both of them - no threat could encroach their honeymoon forest.

—

There were things that the Indoraptor did for stress relief that he didn't know the purpose of, only that he'd always done it.

Blue did similar things, just in a different way.

Only when the Indoraptor happened upon a herd of rutting deer did he come up with the genius idea that their two activities could be combined into one shared activity. When he returned to Blue it took a little miming and convincing to try it out, but they got the hang of it eventually.

Neither had any idea what this activity _was,_ or what it would inevitably lead to. They'd never interacted with the same creature of the opposite sex, nor had they ever seen the long-off product of engaging in these acts. Like birds, they just did it because it felt good, and because they could share it.

Henry Wu hadn't intended to make the Indoraptor reproductively viable. The chances of him somehow wreaking havoc with his fertility when locked in a cell were slim to none, so it was simply more effort than it was worth to sterilize him. So five years later, a hundred miles away, he was still intact.

Then Blue became sick.

—

It started with Blue becoming suddenly ravenous; their hunts doubled in frequency, and though the Indoraptor didn't complain, he was starting to get a little fat from the food and their non-nomadic lifestyle. Then Blue suddenly swore off hunting altogether, and displayed weakness to some inner discomfort. She paced irritably from wall to wall in the house and rarely ventured outside, perturbed by something she didn't understand. The Indoraptor, no matter how good-natured his pushing, couldn't convince her to come outside with him.

For three scary days, she lingered in the living room, bloated and panting in one corner. The Indoraptor hunted and brought his kills to her, worryingly pressing chunks of meat to her mouth to get food in her. She ate little, yet bulged much in her midsection.

Suddenly she whined and lurched to her feet, and where she'd been resting there lay an egg. The Indoraptor stared, and Blue, panting, turned to stare. It had come from her body. They were no stranger to eggs — many times had they robbed the nests of ground birds for a snack, or the larger eggs of the errant dinosaur herd roaming the woods for a bigger meal. But never before had an egg come from Blue's body.

The mystery didn't end there. The next day, Blue laid another one. She laid two the day after that. On the fourth day she laid one final egg, in the same place as those that preceded it, and padded away from the site with a pep in her step that hadn't been present for a long time.

Blue and the Indoraptor leaned on each other and stared at the five eggs. They had no idea what to make of them. Eggs were food to them, and nothing more; neither had chanced upon an egg in the process of hatching, and so they never made the connection that they usually contained new life. They felt the urge to eat them, but the fact that they had come from Blue's body deterred them, some primal aversion to the idea warning them away. After the novelty wore off, they just ignored the eggs. They were accepted as an oddity, an incident that soon faded from memory, save for the occasional glance at that corner of the house.

Eggs need care, and the story could have easily ended soon before it began for those five eggs. But it was also the peak of a California summer, preceded by many years of heavy seasonal rainfall. The mud that had washed beneath the house's floorboards carried with it a thick layer of uprooted vegetation that caked against the foundations, and when baked by the sun, enough heat came from above and below that the eggs were accidentally incubated.

The first pip went unnoticed and unseen as the unwitting parents hunted. Tiny lungs filled with their first breath of cool air. She was not the first baby _Deinonychus_ born into the wild at the same time as man, but she was the first on the continent, and the beginning of something new.

In the middle of that night, the Indoraptor sensed Blue missing from his side. He descended the stairs to find her before the egg site, crouched and intent. He joined her and startled. One of the eggs was ruptured, and between its shards was a bent, limp creature. Its head was huge; its spine zigzagged across the floor, its limbs draped haphazardly along and shining with fluid. Its little sides heaved with breath. He could not find eyes, merely bulges in skin where they should have been.

Blue nosed it clumsily, and it did not react to her touch. She opened her mouth, tempted to eat it, but closed it again. The discomfort brought about by warring instincts was too much of a bother to stick around; she straightened up and padded out the door.

The Indoraptor remained, an unknowing sire. He settled on his haunches and reached forward with a dexterous claw. He nudged the strange thing, nostrils flaring, and received no response, though he registered the little body was warm and thrumming. He jerked his neck back when another egg wobbled just a bit. On its surface was another pip, and just behind it in shadow was the pebbled snout of another odd creature.

As equally disconcerted as Blue, the Indoraptor, head wagging, padded away. After nearly a day of dozing and rooting around the soil for bugs by the riverbed, the two raptors returned to the house and sniffed curiously at the corner. The initial creature was sitting up. Its neck was bent harshly forward, its arms were tucked to its sides. The corners of its mouth seemed to split its head in half. And its eyes were open, bright orange and staring blankly at the walls.

At sound and movement, it suddenly opened its tiny maw, jerked its neck forward, and peeped. Its body bobbed up. It returned to its still seat, then bobbed and peeped again. Like a bird in a cuckoo clock it jerkily bounced, begging for what its parents had no experience providing.

Behind it, all five of the eggs were either ruptured or in the process of being broken, and among the shards were more ugly creatures, prone like the first one was the previous day. Blue, having had enough of the confusing corner, padded upstairs; dust filtered down from the ceiling where her footsteps fell above.

The Indoraptor remained, just as he'd done the first time. Though the small thing couldn't have been a threat, he approached it with slow and tentative footsteps. He craned his neck forward to sniff it. It was smaller than his hand, disproportionate and gangly, but some figure or feature called out for him to recognize it. In the curve of its spine, in the twitch of its limbs, it pulled at his memory.

The creature bobbed and peeped right in his face. Its scales were dry and pale, paler than steely Blue's. An indigo stripe ran down its sides.

The Indoraptor thought of his frail, white brother. And like lightning, cognition rushed through him. It was a little, ugly raptor. Little like his brother used to be, and how the Indoraptor himself was years ago. In coming from this egg, this egg that had come from Blue, and Blue who had shared everything with him since the fire, this creature was of himself. They were of the same flesh, and formerly of the same form. He was full of understanding.

How small and helpless he had been then! He could barely move without the aid of gloved hands. He felt those hands upon him, felt the shake in his limbs and the heaviness of the wide, huge world, and gazed upon the hatchling and knew that those feelings existed in this baby as well. Nobody had answered his peeping cries in the white, sterile tanks where he was left, wired to monitors but never touched unless necessary, until the contact he craved meant only pain and death.

But that did not have to be so for this hatchling. When he realized that, that his past did not need to live longer, that this new thing did not know anything, he felt a great sense of duty. He was big and strong and experienced, enough to share with all five. Little things died fast; what if a big thing nurtured the spark within them? The Indoraptor bent low, his head gliding forward above the ground, until his snout just brushed the hatchling's trembling side. Its peeps doubled in frequency. Its claws shook across his scales. It was so impossibly fragile, full to the brim with warm life. How could it do anything in such a weakened state? How could it hunt?

The Indoraptor had no experience with parenthood, but the faintest paternal instincts awoke in his scrambled genes. He pressed closer to his hatchling and hummed the comfort-noise he and Blue used when settling down to preen and sleep. The hatchling, a female, quieted, sitting there with big eyes and a jumping throat.

The Indoraptor was himself hungry, and in the spirit of his empathy, realized the hatchlings must be hungry too. He rose to his feet and stalled. He felt the urge to sate their fragile hunger, but also the newborn pull to remain near to them, suddenly certain that calamity would befall them if he but looked away. And he couldn't bear that. His protective instincts were fierce in his heritage and fiercer in his experience of cruelty, and the desire to keep cruelty far from them. The oldest daughter's insistent peeping finally drove him out the door.

Maddeningly, all prey seemed to have left the area the second he truly needed something to be nearby. An hour had passed before he returned with a possum; dropping it before his daughter, he faltered at her yawning throat. She made no effort to bite it herself. Impatient, he ripped a chunk of red meat from its innards, smaller than what he perceived was the diameter of her gullet, and pressed it to her mouth. With an ugly croak, she gobbled it down and peeped for more. In careful strips, he fed her until she refused to peck more at his red mouth, her belly distended and eyes lazy with sleep.

The second to hatch, a gray male with an orange stripe, was halfway sitting with his mouth agape. He perked up when the Indoraptor pressed meat to his mouth too, and was fed to contentment. The remaining three were recently hatched and still limp, and wouldn't eat even when offered food. After fretting much, the Indoraptor just swallowed the rest of the carcass.

He sank down beside them all, cutting off their corner from the world, close enough that the first daughter could lean against the soft underside of his neck and sleep. Her throat pulsed with the rapid breath of infancy, with the thrum of her heart. The life inside her was so fragile, and so uniquely precious.

The Indoraptor's heart was pounding. He had no idea why.

—

The Indoraptor was still lying in the corner when Blue wandered downstairs, wondering why he hadn't come up to sleep. By that time the three limp hatchlings had begun to sit up and peep, and were fed to engorgement by their anxious father. The Indoraptor watched Blue approach balefully. She was a big thing in the midst of his small things, a questionable offense no matter how familiar he was with her. She, tense at his tenseness, sniffed the daughter White twitching feebly against his throat with idle, unattached curiosity.

The smallest hatchling, the one who had hatched fifth, began to squirm and rake his limbs across the ground. Of all the babies, he was the darkest, and painted in a light drip down his sides was a yellow stripe. Looking at him made the Indoraptor feel like he was peering into a still pool. He leaned up and stretched his neck toward Black, crooning like a motorcycle, hoping Black would stop moving and stoking his fears.

He felt movement over his neck and looked. Blue was pecking White — with careless brutality! He leapt to his feet and bowled her over onto her back, screaming. Blue kicked and scratched him, scrambling to her feet. The Indoraptor bent low over the five hatchlings and uttered terrible warnings, garbled hisses and screeches, hotter in fury than any moment ever before.

Blue knew resource guarding when she saw it, and her interest in these living bobbleheads tripled. She was yet to understand their origins. Her only experience with baby raptors was her own youth and faint recollections of her sisters, but she was a well-socialized beast and had no use for those years. The Indoraptor, raised in isolation, was more used to plumbing the depths of his memories for comfort.

Blue barked at the Indoraptor to stand down and let her investigate; he obeyed no such command, and only rumbled louder. The hatchlings quivered, the loud noises offensive to their newborn senses.

Their quaking drew Blue's eye first in predatory interest, and then again in discomforting confusion. There was something about them that set her on edge. Only when the littlest of them, Black, happened to turn his wobbly head in her direction, mirroring the angle of his father's head above, did Blue see the resemblance, and then the significance of that resemblance. And as her mind traveled fast along the circuit connecting them all — creatures, egg, Blue, Indoraptor — she grew still and tall, eyes wide and nostrils flaring. The Indoraptor spied her calm and calmed himself, settling out of his crouch but ready to leap nonetheless.

Blue's memories danced with phantoms of her infant siblings, playing in a simulated savannah that stretched to four too-short horizons with rubber and plastic, between the fleshy trunks of man-legs. A new generation of Deinonychus blinked up at her from below the bowed shield of the Indoraptor's body.

Blue made the peace-noise, croons vibrating from her throat and ululating through her teeth. She padded forward and stuck her neck out, sniffing and nuzzling the Indoraptor's snout with her own, all apologies and understandings. He, mollified, moved aside, so Blue could meet their children. Her nostrils flared, taking in the scent and heat roiling off of White. She moved then to Gray, then to the females Yellow and Orange — they with dusty tan scales and a sky-blue stripe, and orange scales and a gold stripe — and finally to Black, feeling like a giant looking down at another Indoraptor.

Black trembled, blinking up at her with his mouth agape and teeth exposed. He peeped quietly, the pink of his tongue flashing. Something in her gut nudged Blue; the hatchlings would be hungry again. Their little limbs could not carry them, could not strike for them. But she, if she were to find and kill and bring the meat, would sustain their growth, give them strength.

Blue straightened up, announcing her hunting call as she padded toward the door. But she did not sound the "come with me" call, and if she had, she most likely would have been ignored. The Indoraptor settled down again, his long neck raised to watch her go, White slouching between his forelegs. Blue glanced back at the door, stopped, then circled back to bump her snout against that of the Indoraptor. Finally understood, he crooned to her, thinking promises of grooming and cuddling, they seven, when she returned.

She raced off to find food for their children, while the Indoraptor kept watch. Against his belly, the five baby raptors peeped, sleepy and at ease.

Hundreds of miles away, a group of people in charge of many more people passed an act. Though these lands were already protected, regulations and enforcement were lacking, and the closure of an ineffective administration in January provided a gentler sect of leaders with the opportunity to fix that.

It was the largest swath of land ever protected in the United States, and the most strictly regulated. No more would poachers or unwanted wanderers sully the forest depths where dinosaurs had escaped, since the creatures had proven themselves awkward but relatively seamless additions to the local ecosystem. Roberta, never a subtle beast, was found, extracted, and contained in a manufactured ecosystem twice and thrice and quadrice secured on the east coast, where not even money could gain access for those who wanted to gawk at her. Admirers were well-supplied with content, though, when her handlers set up a picture-heavy Twitter account.

As for the raptor, no one but Owen Grady and Claire Dearing knew exactly where she was, and they were determined to keep it that way. And not even they knew that the Indoraptor had lived, nor could they possibly know about White, Gray, Yellow, Orange, and Black.

Truth be told, neither Owen nor Claire, nor even Maisy, whom they'd adopted, would be terribly sorry if they never saw another dinosaur in their entire lives. But something about the beasts still drew them, as sure as it had drawn them from the very beginning, and again and again thereafter. So they settled along that California preserve in a large home in the forest near a small town, content to live normal and unassuming lives, but also aware that their proximity may expose them one day to the creatures that had consumed their lives. They didn't particularly mind.

And if that creature, in her wanderings, happened to be Blue, she'd visit with company.

—

 **everyone who commented with something along the lines of "hurry up and update": shut it. you should know by now that's a rude as hell thing to comment to a writer. don't ever do that dumb shit again**

 **The thrilling conclusion! Originally I had a fourth chapter planned, but my ambition usually exceeds my ability and I am nOT falling for that trap. Hope you enjoyed! Please let me know what you thought!**


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